I almost lost my begonias this spring when I left them outside one night when the temperature dropped below freezing. But now they’re growing back from the roots and looking more gorgeous than ever. This is leaf is from one of them.
I’m drew this on Arches hotpress watercolor paper with Mars Lumnograph pencils. No blending tools were used on this piece. I let the natural beauty of pencil hatching on paper show.
The photo is at the bottom of the post.
I was tempted to begin with the central leaf, but then I would have been ‘tucking in’ the background around it and worrying about smearing it with my hand too, so I began drawing in the top left-hand corner. For the lightest areas, I’m using H and HB pencils, and I’m using a 2B pencil for the very darkest spot.
I love the depth I’m seeing right away in the curled leaf. When I see how beautifully graphite portrays depth and detail with its wonderful graininess, I always fall in love with graphite all over again.
I’m working down the left-hand side and with 2H, 4H, H and HB pencils in the lighter areas and a 6B and 2B in the very dark spot. I like the depth that is developing here in contrast to the lighter main leaf.
There will be more detail on the main leaf in this quarter, but I’ll add it after I draw the underlying values. I like to save the small surface detail until last so I can just add what I want over a realistically modeled surface.
I can’t decide whether to draw the light edges of the leaves as I hatch, or add them after the leaves are completely hatched by erasing. So, each light edge you see is a mixture of techniques. At least my inability to decide is keeping my drawing skills nimble.
I’m drawing this from my iPad in the Copyit app. The app allows me to quickly switch to grayscale, and I’m taking advantage of that. It’s a very handy app.
I used a kneaded eraser to create the ‘dapple’ effect in the leaf in the bottom left hand corner by ‘lifting’ the texture with a rounded tip.
The veins and other details I’m adding in the central leaf are not exact, but they are close enough. By ‘close enough’ I mean that they would range from forty to sixty percent on a reality scale.
The pressure was on to draw the center of the big leaf, and I wobbled! The light values are too light and so are the dark values. It gives the illusion that this part of the leaf rises up more than it should. Oh, well. I can correct these things in the next round.
I corrected the section of the leaf I worked on last time by hatching over the light and dark areas with an H pencil. That visually pushed those areas ‘down’ a little more.
I’ve never come across a range gap in Lumnograph pencils before but feel as if there is a slight gap between the H and HB now. I used the H pencil in the upper left quadrant of the central leaf and pushed it to the absolute limit of that pencil, but the HB would have been too dark instead of continuing that gradation. It was a challenge, but I got the value I wanted.
The light leaf in the upper right boarder is going to be a little darker than the reference, and I’m just beginning to experiment with its value at this stage.
I held my breath as I started to put the detail dots on the main leaf! I wasn’t sure how to go about it, and the leaf looked okay without them, but I had planned to add the dots and didn’t want to let fear stop me.
There were more dots I could have added. I added about 70% of them on the left-hand side of the leaf and some various other ones over the rest of the leaf. I used an H pencil with a dull tip, then I lifted back the value if needed with a kneaded eraser.
On the right-hand side of the leaf, the dots became light spots. I put them in with the tiny pinched tip of a kneaded eraser, and then I re-shaped the spots with a 2H pencil. However, the spots are so small and light in these areas that you might not be able to see them very well in the scan.
I’m glad I was brave enough to add the spots. They finish the drawing nicely.
I’m happy with this drawing. I’m particularly pleased with the way graphite’s pretty graininess portrays the leaf’s shape.
Keep drawing everyone,
Carol
